


Anaemia

by orphan_account



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Forced Pregnancy, Gen, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26886868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Theon’s symptoms arrived when the weather turned colder.
Relationships: Ramsay Bolton/Reek, Ramsay Bolton/Theon Greyjoy
Comments: 5
Kudos: 64





	Anaemia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sylvanWhispers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylvanWhispers/gifts).



> I don't know how this happened. Sylvan has too much power over me and knows my weaknesses.

Theon’s symptoms arrived when the weather began to turn colder. 

At first, he thought he was dying.

The weight of captivity had long since worn him down around the edges. It fit easier these days — not lighter, not by any means. But Theon had given up scratching the days into the kennel floor. It didn’t matter. Somewhere, in the space between the first kiss of a flaying knife against his skin and the clench of the collar around his throat, he’d lost something small but precious; an inner strength that had once driven him to stare up through eyes stinging with blood and sweat and insist he was Theon Greyjoy. He wasn't sure where it had gone. Maybe it had bled out on the saltire.

In any case, it was easier to be Reek. And so he would continue to be Reek, and then one day he would die — from sickness, or starvation, or a particularly violent encounter with Ramsay’s knife — and his guttering mockery of a life would extinguish with no more thought than what was given to pinching out a candle, and that would be the end of things.

In many ways, he longed for it. How pleasant would it be, to lay his exhausted body down and simply not get up again? To flee from Ramsay’s madbright eyes and greedy fingers into a space beyond even his bloodstained reach? 

So when the fever first crept into his limbs and hollowed out an ache in his bones, Theon only thought with a faint sense of relief, _finally._

But it was a sickness unlike any Theon had ever experienced. The fever seeped through his mind like warm mist. He couldn’t think clearly, he was more hungry than he could ever recount being, and every little hurt and ache and pain seemed magnified. 

And yet, it didn’t occur to him what might be causing the fever until a day he was tasked with bringing Ramsay’s supper up to his private rooms. The dish — quail, its plucked skin browned and crackly, still sizzling in its sauce; carrots, stewed and honeyed; rich brown barley bread drowning in butter —smelled so appetizing that Theon made himself nauseous swallowing his drool. He pushed open the door with his shoulder, maimed hands awkwardly balancing the tray’s delicate dishes ... and froze when Ramsay’s scent rushed up to meet him, as shocking and abrupt as a slap to the face.

It neatly sidestepped logical thought. It dove under the brittle layers of his mind, cutting straight to the heart of him like an arrow. It gutted him in the pit of his belly the way a hook pierced a wriggling worm. It did not recognize Ramsay with any measure of complex cogitation, it only recognized _alpha_ , and what normally smelled like blood and masculine sweat and _painterrorfear_ suddenly appealed, inconceivably, to a part of himself Theon had long learned to disregard.

Ramsay turned to look at him where he stood there stupidly in the doorway. The tray slipped through Theon’s limp fingers. Amid the sounds of the plateware crashing and shattering, he watched, detached from himself, as Ramsay sucked in a quick breath to yell … and then stopped, nostrils flaring, pupils dilating. It set off a fire in Theon’s stomach that demanded dousing, and knew Ramsay could do it, would do it, had to do it.

Ramsay swept towards him like a terrible stormcloud and Theon cringed, _wait wait wait what is this wait —_ and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. Theon allowed himself to be steered inside Ramsay’s chambers and then thrown down to the rushes in front of the hearth. He did not fight on his way down. The pain when his bony knees collided with the floor seemed blunted, unimportant.

Ramsay followed him down to the floor and set about tearing at his rags. Old and worn as they were, they shredded easily under his hands. Heat from the hearth rolled over Theon’s naked, filthy flesh, but it couldn’t compare to the burn that scorched him from head to toe in relentless waves. 

When Ramsay put a heavy hand on Theon’s neck and pushed his face into the floor, he meant to resist, but somehow it got jumbled up in his head and what he ended up doing was sucking Ramsay’s thumb into his mouth. Ramsay’s flesh tasted like salt and sweat and scraped over the point of one of Theon’s broken teeth. 

Theon hurt.

“Master,” he beseeched. It was a miserable cry, plainly sodden with the understanding that he could expect no mercy from his lord. When had Ramsay ever been merciful?

 _Maybe if he will just fuck me,_ Theon thought deliriously, spine bending into an arch under Ramsay’s proprietary hands. Part of him howled at that — _I am an Ironborn, not even the lowest of Ironborn omegas would submit to a mainlander —_ but it was largely deafened by the blind need that had sprouted up through his lungs and mind and heart, choking him like weeds.

He rubbed his cheek against the fire-warmed floor, drooling and eyes glazed, while Ramsay rutted into him viciously. When had he entered him? Theon could not remember. It almost seemed as though his entire life had begun in this moment.

Obscene, mocking things were panted into the sensitive shell of his ear. Theon was grateful not to hear them. His awareness of self had turned inwards, focused only on the way his wet flesh could ripple around Ramsay’s thick length and suckle it into his body so welcomingly. 

Ramsay fucked him many more times that night: battered against the door, bent and spread over the opulent bed so that the furs brushed against Theon’s nipples, raised and lowered in Ramsay’s lap in the squashy armchair. 

“My tide,” Theon remembered saying at one point. He was crying; Ramsay was so big inside him that the tears were simply forced out. He didn’t understand how misery and arousal could entwine so tightly that they could not be distinguished from one another. “I’m sorry master, it’s my tide —”

“Finally,” Ramsay laughed into his ear, pinning him to the bed with a cruel hand planted in his lower back. Theon obeyed his direction, tame as a kitten. He had to turn his face to be able to breathe. “I’d started to wonder if you were even more useless than Balon Greyjoy thought.”

At some point he fed Theon the cold remains of his forgotten supper. Theon licked congealed sauce off the floor and chewed morsels of toughened meat from Ramsay’s hands. When it was all gone, he climbed back into Ramsay’s lap, and the tide washed over him again in brilliant sensation and nauseating confusion.

* * *

Two weeks after Theon’s first heat passed, more symptoms arrived.

**Author's Note:**

> Some worldbuilding notes:  
> In this verse, omegas generally do not experience heats until late teens/early twenties. It is considered a capstone of sexual maturity. Alphas experience their first rut earlier, usually mid-to-late teens.
> 
> In Ironborn culture, omegas are often warriors alongside betas and alphas. They help staff ships, and an Ironborn omegan rock-wife will always rank above outsiders taken as salt-wives or salt-grooms (borrowing salt-grooms from you Sylvan), no matter the outsider's secondary dynamic.
> 
> "Heat" as it is recognized within the trope is called a "heat" by mainlanders in Westeros. Being a largely seafaring people, Ironborn liken it to tides, so it is called thusly. Omegas are intersex; males can carry young, though they often experience far more miscarriages and birth complications than female omegas.


End file.
